In recent years a substantial market has developed for T-shirts, caps, jackets, etc., that are provided with printed matter. Such printed matter on these types of apparel include advertisements as well as work of art or simply slogan and writings of a nonadvertising nature.
A very significant amount of such printing is accomplished through what is known as screen printing. Simply stated, a screen is designed and prepared to yield a certain design, insignia, symbol or the like. Such a screen is designed to be accepted by a printing machine and once installed, is lowered onto the article to be printed such that the screen lies adjacent to and over the area to be printed. A squeegee including an ink solution is then moved over the screen and the ink solution is allowed to sift or move through selected areas of the screen to yield a desired design on the underlying apparel. It follows that multi-colored designs can be accomplished by using a series of screens along with a series of different colored ink solutions.
There are a number of very distinct advantages to screen printing. First, it is relative simple and can be generally accomplished without a great deal of trouble at a reasonable expense. In addition screens can be relatively easily designed at a cost that does not require a large volume of printing in order to justify such.
There is, however, a number of serious drawbacks with respect to screen printing. In this regard, for the most part, screen printing devices and apparatuses have tended to be too sophisticated, complex and expensive. A review of the prior art in this area will reveal screen type printers of the nature disclosed in the following U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,894,451; 4,054,091; 4,266,476; 4,073,232; and 4,084,504. A review of these patents will reveal that screen type printing apparatuses have in fact all too often been too sophisticated and expensive, especially in terms of their capacity. The net result of this is that potential screen printers have not been able to justify an investment in such sophisticated and expensive screen printing machinery.
In addition there is a sizable market in screen printed caps. Often the upper front face portion of caps are commonly used for advertising purposes. Often such caps are printed on machines that are not totally designed for caps per se. The end result of this is that these machines have to be specially altered or the printing process is substantially slowed because of the time involved in appropriately placing and adjusting the cap for proper printing.